# Revisiting the Phenomenon of Syntactic Complexity Convergence on German Dialogue Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12177 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12177/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10643/) (2020)
- [Universal Dependency Parsing from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10457/) (2019)
- [Top-down Tree Long Short-Term Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00060/) (2015)
- [TexPrax: A Messaging Application for Ethical, Real-time Data Collection and Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07846/) (2022)
- [Linear-Time Modeling of Linguistic Structure: An Order-Theoretic Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15057/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Predicting States of Understanding in Explanatory Interactions Using Cognitive Load-Related Linguistic Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20079/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified metric to quantify syntactic complexity based on dependency parsing. The results show that syntactic complexity convergence can be statistically confirmed in one of three selected German datasets that were analysed. Given that the dataset which shows such convergence is much larger than the other two selected datasets, the empirical results indicate a certain degree of linguistic generality of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction. We also found a different type of syntactic complexity convergence in one of the datasets while further investigation is still necessary.